Watches are an interesting area of design, and not just because everything takes place in just a few square centimetres. Traditional techniques still dominate the area of high watchmaking to a degree that is not found in architecture or automotive design, and many watches made today look very similar to their 19th century ancestors. At the same time, there is a lot of research going on, and a few brands are making watches that look like something out of this world.

If magnetism is the enemy, electricity is the Darth Vader of mechanical watches. The arrival of cheap quartz watches caused two-thirds of Switzerland’s watch brands to disappear in the 1970s and ‘80s, and so it is understandable that quartz and electric current don’t have a glowing reputation in the luxury watch industry. When the poetic engineers at Van Cleef & Arpels decided that it would be nice to pick out a constellation in diamonds on the dial, and to actually get them to light up, they couldn’t really use bulbs and a battery. The solution they devised for the Midnight Nuit Lumineuse was piezoelectric, based on a type of ceramic, which, when caused to vibrate by the movement, generates enough energy to power six electroluminescent diodes for about four seconds. www.vancleefarpels.com